Picture of success

Henk Schollen is a man with a mission. Always curious for something new, something better. He is determined to transform his life into a “picture of success” In 1980, the then owner of a bodyshop decides to focus all his energies on glass repair. Having acquired the know-how during a stay in the US, once home, he decides to make investigation in cooperation with the Dutch Insurance association on the development of a new concept, which he shortly afterwards presented to the Dutch Association of Insurers. With success: a Dutch insurance company is the first insurer during those pioneering years to offer repair of damaged car windshields against a limited excess.

“It has become an incredibly interesting market since then,” says Henk Schollen, who learned early on that he had to work closely with insurance companies and endeavour to introduce windshield repair to the wider market. On average, the repair of a car windshield will cost you around 75 euros, while a new Windshield can range between 350 and 800 euros. Furthermore, truck and bus windshields are also often perfectly serviceable, while the cost of an entire bus windshield will regularly amount to around 7,000 euros. This illustrates the enormous benefits of repair.

The Dutch insurance companies pay out around 275 million euros annually for the replacement and repair of damaged windshields. Henk Schollen is the founder and pioneer of this commercially attractive business concept, which nowadays has grown into a perfectly developed service network spanning all existent glass service centres.  They have him to thanks for their success.

Schollen, entrepreneur and inventor, founded Duobond International B.V. in the eighties. In the nineties, the company Scratch-A-Way B.V. was added to this.

In 2011 the windshield repair products of Duobond and Scratch-A-Way are represented by 28 agents across 25 countries.

For many years, Duobond has been the exclusive supplier of expertise, equipment and materials to many glass service networks.

Innovation and quality are of paramount importance to the company. It is precisely this continuously monitored quality that is at the basis of the “picture of success” that Henk Schollen always envisioned. Schollen: “The resin quality used to repair the damaged Windshield is continually monitored under laboratory conditions in our own laboratory. It is particularly the equipment that we constantly improve to increase the efficiency of the glass repairs. Because we don’t ever want to stop improving.

We owe it to ourselves but also to our consumers.”